podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

A rerun podcast from 2006

This word highlights the dangers of electronic media.

I looked up bamboozled in the Oxford English Dictionary online, that’s where the draft third edition can be found.

There is a verb to bamboozle and a noun bamboozle so I clicked on the etymology for the first one listed online, the noun, and it said to check the etymology of the preceding word; which is “bamboos” and is defined as a wooden drinking vessel for milk or water etc.

The implication is that it may derive from drinking vessels made from a piece of bamboo.

Aha, I think, maybe the word comes from drinking, I mean to be bamboozled is sort of being confused, and this work sort of contains the word booze.  Let’s look at the definitions here, to deceive by trickery, well that’s got nothgin to do with drinking or drinking vessels.  Let’s check Etymonline, no, American Heritage dictionary, no.

Well, to be truthful, none of my sources go down that path, so what’s the OED telling me.

Well it turns out that the lexicographers at Oxford haven’t yet gotten around to this particular word so its entry is still the same as the one in the second edition.  Except that in their electronic database, the order that they list the noun and the verb has been reversed so that while in the second edition the verb comes first, and the noun references its etymology to the preceding word, in the online version, the noun comes first so it is referencing a word that isn’t even related.

Bamboozle has nothing at all to do with wooden drinking cups.

So the real etymology is that it appeared, evidently as slang, in around 1700.

Evidently people have always complained that the English language was going to hell in a hand basket because “bamboozle” appeared as one of the words in a publication called the Tatler 300 years ago in an article about

the continual corruption of our English tongue

Etymonline agrees with the slang origin but also offers a couple of words from Scottish dialect and French that could have lead to bamboozle.